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Thursday, August 30, 2007

Two hours

From what I've seen, if there's one MTV show that's still beloved by people these days, it's 120 Minutes. As someone who watched during the Matt Pinfield years, it still is very much beloved for me. Serving as an introduction to bands from Pavement to the Promise Ring to Belle & Sebastian, I'm forever grateful. With a number of clips played on the show back in the day, as well as in-studio performances, on YouTube, now there's a Tumblr site devoted to them. (Kudos to Idolator and Jason for pointing this out to me.)

The strange thing for me is: I dont spend hours upon hours watching old clips these days. If this was twelve years ago, I would, but it's not what I'm really into now. Not to sound like a party-pooper, but it's like watching commercials for a product you already bought. The record, like the band, is the product being peddled to you. Since I bought the CD, do I really need to watch the videos again?

This said, I enjoy watching video collections on DVD from time to time. I like videos where's there's more than a band miming a song for the camera. In addition to Pavement's, Belle & Sebastian's, the Pixies' and Killswitch Engage's (which include videos and a documentary on the band), I have Suede's stand-alone collection of videos, as well as Superchunk's and Blur's. I guess the key factor with these is they are videos worth watching again and again. Great example of this: Suede's "Trash" without the Nowhere footage.

My point is, watching videos all the time is not something I'm all about now. I guess the Internet makes up for MTV morphing 120 Minutes into Subterranean and VH1 Classic 120 Minutes. Since an attitude with the Internet is, "Why wait? Find it now!", the desire for paying out of the nose for VH1 Classic lessens.

1 comment:

This is going to seem real whiny and old-lady-ish, but what I miss about 120 Minutes? The fact that it was on and exposed me to new music. It's beloved because that's where we found out about bands, and now that we're older there's no one place to see that anymore (or maybe there is, but we can't afford digital cable.)

I know, I know. If I dig enough on the internet or on iTunes I can probably find what I am looking for, but I'm just . . . I guess, lazy . . .